 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Our Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi sallam is the perfect role for us in all dimensions of life. As a teacher he transformed the lives of the Sahaba and trained them to be the leaders of the world causing a revolution in world history. Can we do similar kinds of teaching which would change the lives of the students and turn them into world changers. Modern education which is the methodology by which we have been taught and by which we teach is incapable of doing this. It is a purely technical education. There is no mention of ideals visions goals of life. How did this modern education come into being? That is something worth studying because it was not always like this and in early 20th century in the across the USA the goal of university education was to build character and Julie Ribbon has written in a book about how this goal eventually dropped out of a university education. Because we Muslims are in shock and awe of the West and we imitate them without thinking it is necessary for us to dig into the roots of modern education to understand why it is defective so that we can create effective change. Basically centuries of religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in Europe taught the European intellectuals that you cannot build society on religious background so it became necessary to recreate all of the sciences of the society on objective secular grounds and this led to a great transformation in European thought where they rejected the tradition authority and also rejected the subjective experience of life that human beings have and our heart and soul. Instead they said we must rebuild the entire stock of knowledge from zero using only objective facts and logic. Modern education is built on several serious mistakes of this enlightenment project. Firstly it's impossible to build knowledge starting from zero. When you have a conclusion it must be based on some premise of assumptions so even in Descartes original deduction I think therefore I am the premises I think and in this premise the existence of I is already assumed so there is nothing really serious going on here. Now society human society consists of individuals each of them have a unique lived subjective experience of the world which is incorporates their hearts and souls and their experiences. Exclusion of this from the source of knowledge makes it impossible to understand human beings and it makes it impossible to understand human society and this is why what accounts for the sterility of the model of human behavior in modern economics which basically says that human beings live to maximize the pleasure they get from consumption of goods and services which is a completely absurd and ridiculous model of human behavior. Rejection of God and afterlife naturally led to focus on the pleasures of this world and their maximization which was very important in the transition to a market society which now dominates the world. In a traditional society social relationships dominate the market but under the capitalist economic system market relationships dominate social relationships. Now there are many aspects of our lives which are outside the scope of a market. The love of a mother for a child cannot be bought or sold for money but in a market society everything is for sale and in particular a teacher-student relationship is a market relationship. The teachers are hired by the university and the student pays to receive this education product and knowledge important knowledge valuable knowledge is what allows you to earn money. So all of these are ideas which are in conflict with Islamic ideas about knowledge and education and teacher student relations. So the question for us in this lecture is how can we change a market relationship where we are rented teachers for hired teachers to Islamic relationships where the teachers the Murshid, the Mrabi, the guide, counselor, life coach, confidant all of these are social relations teachers can have to their students and this is what we need in order to create revolutions in the lives of our students in order to transform them into people with vision to change the world. So but how can we do this? Are we worthy of doing this? Do we have the training necessary to fulfill these ideals? Well one must realize that when we are put in front of the students and we are acting as teachers then we will transform their lives regardless of what we do. Either it will be positive or negative. If we fail to act up to live up to the ideas then we will be teaching students a very bad and negative lessons. So we have to fulfill this responsibility that we have taken upon our heads by adopting this profession of teaching. We want to change the lives of our students. We will also have to change ourselves and in any process of change decisions have to make critical decisions, serious decisions or if students come to us for guidance regarding matters that we don't fully understand. Allah has given us a process for making decisions and that is t'khara and mashwara and so we will consult with fellow teachers and others about how we can make changes in our own decision making. We'll make t'khara to Allah for asking his guidance and similarly we will counsel our students to use these tools to make their decisions. The first step in transformative cheating is to acquire a great deal of respect for our students to believe them potentially capable of changing the world just like a seed has the potential to become a tree. So our students are equipped with everything they need to become great people and it is our job to provide them with the environment which will allow them to grow. So we have to think of them as being potential Ibn Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Ibn Al-Haisam, Al-Kindi, Al-Khwarizmi, all of the heroes of our intellectual past. It is not up to us to give them the knowledge that they need. It is up to provide them with the confidence and with the inspiration to make the struggle as the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said that people are like mines of gold and silver but this treasure is buried within them and it is our job as teachers to bring this out. The second model of teaching, the teacher is the expert, the students are ignorant and the teacher transfers his knowledge to the students. This is radically different from the Islamic model where we are all fellow travelers on a journey. Perfection lies in the perfect model which was given to us in the shape of our Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and our goal is the same as that of the students. How to achieve this perfection? So we all make work towards achieving this goal and this is a very different role for the teacher from the one that we are used to. We cannot stuff education into the minds of our students. Instead all we can do is to motivate them to learn. Every human being is born with the desire to learn. The babies are very efficient learning machines. If you ever watch them you see how they are constantly testing their environment to see what they can learn. The students have to taste the thrill of mastering a subject and someone learns to drive a car. He feels excited that I have now this knowledge which allows me to control the world. He feels the power of this knowledge. Similarly we have to give the students knowledge which empowers them, which allows them to understand the world we live in, which relates to their life experience, which allows them to think about policies which could create positive change. So the Western methodology the teacher takes a subject matter and gives it to all the students assuming that everyone is in the same place. But actually teaching doesn't work in that way. Every student is capable of learning everything actually. If the material is broken up into small steps and the steps start from where he currently stands and this requires understanding where the students are and what is the next step they can take. And if we do this it is our job to make learning easy. And if the student fails to do this it's because we have given a subject which it is impossible for him to master. What is the if we give him a journey of a thousand miles and he is only capable of doing one kilometer and then he will fail and he will feel that he is a failure. And so this is very harmful to the students. Instead we have to believe in the capability. We have to motivate them and we have to give them tasks which are suited to the level at which they are. How can we take these grand ideas and implement them in our real life classrooms? I will base my discussion on two questions that were raised on a previous lecture which is available from the link given here. One of the teachers asked that if we do the best we can but our students fail the midterms basically implying that students are not really capable of understanding the material that we are providing them then what can we do? Another question that arose was that I think that our security procedures surrounding the midterms are lax and the students manage to get copies illegally and then they use them to cheat. And so what we need to do is to tighten the security procedures. Both of these reflect a mindset which is very different from the Islamic methodology. So the higher teacher mindset is that we have done our job, we have given them a textbook, we have delivered a lecture and now it's up to the student to succeed or fail which we're not really concerned. But the parental mindset takes pride in the success of the student and feels sort of for their failure and if we see failure then we try to see what we can do to fix this. So if teachers are continuously monitoring the progress of their students at the end of every day they learn what students have done, what they have not done, what they can do, they will never be surprised by a failure of students in midterm because they know the kinds of questions the students are capable of answering and the kinds which they are not. If students are cheating we need to find out why? Why do they lack the confidence in their skills and also how can we create honesty and integrity so they won't be tempted to cheat? So these are very different questions from the, so the parental questions are very different from the higher teacher questions. We move from impersonal market relationship to social relationships of parenting, guiding, mentoring. There's an immediate problem that arises because students and teachers have been conditioned to think in terms of scores. So why doesn't this, if the teacher is such a friend of the student, why doesn't he give the student full scores? The students are always thinking about if the teacher gives us less than full marks then he's not our friend. So the thing is that we need to shift focus from scores to knowledge. Our job is to provide skills. If we teach driving then the success occurs when the student learns how to drive and if he doesn't know how to drive then giving a hundred on the driving test is useless. Similarly bridge building, doctoring, all of these are things that you need to learn how to do. So basically we have to change our mindsets that it's about providing skills not about giving scores. And this will involve repackaging our teaching material into skills which the students have to learn and we have to also create a grading methodology such that if the students know the skills then they will get the score. Repackaging of the teaching materials is actually a long process which requires work on multiple dimensions. I'll just mention what we can do initially to start with without any difficulty with our existing materials and that is to ensure that in each lecture the student learns the answer to some questions. And so we start out by listing one question or two or three or four or five no more than that that these are the questions that the students will learn how to answer in this lecture. And then we teach them how to answer such questions and then we test them at the end of the lecture to see if they have learned how to answer those questions. Once we focus on this then at the end of the midterm if we have given 10 lectures then the students have learned how to answer 50 questions and the exam should come from those 50 questions. Many times the teachers think that their job is to make a difficult exam to make sure that the students cannot answer. Actually the exam should always be on basic questions which anybody who has mastered the skills should be able to answer. Motivating students to learn is very different from teaching them via lectures because we have to look at, we have to first of all motivate them to make the struggle. When they make the struggle then they will face problems. So we have to understand what problem they are facing and how we can help them to solve that problem. So that's why lectures which are just throwing material at the student doesn't lead to learning ever because the students have to struggle with the material themselves to learn. So student-based classrooms engage the students in activities. They get them to solve the problems, figure it out, make the calculations, do whatever is needed, struggle to understand on their own. A teacher's job is to motivate the students to learn and this is done by helping them understand the value of the knowledge in terms of its ability to provide explanation of what is going on in the world. And also the teacher's job is to believe in the capability of the students and this requires providing students with emotional support. And all of these are ways which are not familiar to us. We are familiar with lecturing but we don't know how to be a good teacher in other dimensions. So this we will need to learn. The primary job of the teacher is to inspire and motivate the students so that they make the effort to learn. This also requires our believing in the potential of our students to change the world, to create the confidence in them to make the effort. And I have a number of lectures on this. Students will achieve results in the world according to their ambitions. So it is our job to make them believe that they can change the world, to reach them to reach for the stars and then they will accomplish miracles. Students acquire confidence by mastering material which we give them to learn. But we have to provide them with useful knowledge. The Prophet asked for but he sought protection from useless knowledge. So what is useful knowledge? Well, useful knowledge enters the heart because it relates to our lives and it helps us to understand the real world. So it's a long job to transform the material which we currently have which is taken from western textbooks and relates to western experience. It does not relate to our experience. So it's a long job to transform that but we can start by making a few steps. First of all is to make the intention to use the knowledge that we learn to serve humanity. Then we have to look for what kind of knowledge would it be that would allow us to do to serve humanity. So we have to look at the material we're teaching and we have to figure out how we can use this material to bring changes in the world. How we can relate these material to the life experiences of the students. When we start doing this work we will see that the material we have is very defective and very problematic and we will be able to both understand it more deeply and also to transform it in ways that makes it intelligible to the students. Practicality is it's a tough job to monitor the students on a daily basis to figure out where they stand and how much progress they are making. So there are a number of tools which we can use. One of the simplest is a one-minute feedback. At the end of the class ask the students to write down on a piece of paper what is the single most important thing you learned in class today. So write down in one minute if you collect the papers from this exercise you will learn a lot about what the students learned and what they did not learn. Another step which goes further is to use half the class for lecture and then half the class for feedback on the lecture. So after you prepare the lecture prepare for yourself in your own mind as a teacher what is it that you expect the students to learn from this teacher and create questions which assess this knowledge and then ask in the remaining half of the class after the lecture is done distribute questions to the students and ask them to work out the answers and then get this feedback from them. Assign this problems have them write out the solutions swap the papers among the students and then have them read out okay what was written in the answer and then discuss is this answer good or bad and in this process you will learn who has understood who has not understood what they have understood and you will also be able to differentiate the good students and the bad students the ones who have not understood and then you can team them up you can assign the students who are not understanding to the students who have understood and tell them to bring them up to the understanding level before the next class. Step further in this process by assigning the reading and then doing the what is called the homework inside of class that's why it's called an inverted classroom so in doing this you assign them some reading or often these days videos are available on all materials that is being taught so have them study the material and then tell them that at the beginning of class the class starts at 9am you have a small quiz from 9 to 905 write down a question on the board which has a short one sentence answer and ask them to solve the to answer the question and turn it in one or two short simple questions just to assess if they have done the work so this will make the students arrive on time and do the readings then hand out the problem set which assesses understanding which is the target that the set of questions that you want the students to know how to answer have them have them solve these questions and do it on a in a cooperative way so have the students write out their answers then when everybody has gotten the answers then you ask the students all right who has got it what's the answer have them read it out ask the students what they the students who have not understood ask them well what's your problem why aren't you understanding so that you can understand the obstacles they are facing students often jump for answers they want to know here's the answer is it right or wrong so we have to explain that we're not looking for right or wrong answers we're trying to teach students how to think their way to the answer so what is the first step in understanding the question and what is the first step in trying to solve this question so they learned the process by which answers are obtained not learning the to memorize the answer another method is to give a take-home exam which consists of questions which they can which obviously on a take-home exams they have open books open access to materials they cannot they cannot be given a question which requires a lookup of the answer they must be questions which depend on understanding the material and then answering the questions it must be a higher level question we need to develop this understanding so once they bring it in then we do collective grading so that they are not facing with the stress that and and they should understand that we are trying to develop they should be told that learning how to answer these questions is going to be the critical thing to answer the real questions on the real midterm so this is the thing that the students will be incentivized to try to understand the answers in class you discuss them and you assess who has understood who has not understood and make sure that the understanding that they acquire which they will display is enough for the actual midterm so the actual midterm should be based on the questions that you have given them in the sample midterm need to learn a new methodology for teaching which will bring out the potential in our students it will change the lives of the students to do this we have to change our own ways of thinking and teaching and we have to do some hard work to develop the material to understand the process of teaching to understand how our teaching affects the students and all this is hard work but it is highly rewarding highly it is very wonderful to watch how students respond to good teaching and how they change and how they start becoming ambitious and they start changing themselves and changing others around them. Dua Ta'ala has revealed the final message complete and perfect to guide mankind out from the darkness into the light so let us end this lecture with Dua to Allah Ta'ala to lead us out of the darkness into the light to fill our hearts with the noor of guidance and to allow us to guide our students towards the noor of Allah Subhana rabbika rabbil azat ya'ma yasafoon wa salaamun al-mursaleen walhamdulillahi rabbil al-halim